Create a Geometric Color Explosion

Wes Kandel is back to show us how to combine geometric shapes made in Illustrator and then imported and animated in After Effects to create his very cool Geometrika piece.

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Requirements: Adobe Illustrator (download trial version here)

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Discussion 102 Comments

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  1. M.H.Salimi says:

    Hi Wes . i try to it with ” M ” letter , but when i try to parent the two part of ” M ” ( i mean ” |\ ” & ” /| ” ) i should parent one piece of work with two piece of objects … so can you help me with this ? ( if you don,t understand of problem , tell me for take screen shot )

    Thanks for your great tutorial again .
    i am waiting for answer ;)

    • Wes Kandel says:

      Go ahead and send me a screen shot, and I’d be glad to help.

      • M.H.Salimi says:

        I try other ways so , I think my problem solved .
        But i have another question … how you parent all expressions of layers with ” Chaos control ” layer . Do you do it separately for all layers ?

        Screen shot , if need : http://i42.tinypic.com/eq9k49.jpg

        ,Thanks again ;)

      • M.H.Salimi says:

        I tried many ways , so , i think my problem solved :)
        But i have another question , How you parent all of expressions of scale and rotations of layers , to ” Chaos control ” ( Minute 29 , Second 23 in tutorial ) ? Do you do it separately for all layers ?

        Thanks again for your reply and your great tutorial ,
        M.h.Salimi

  2. Brandon says:

    Wow, even though you showed us basic ground work on how you made this, I learned the most was efficiency and organizing and in depth parenting abilities .

  3. kyd says:

    gooooood!!!

  4. Diego SA says:

    FANTASTIC! This song I’ll have right now!

  5. Tim says:

    ah I hate it! I LOVE this title animation, but I can’t think of anything original to use it for! I wish I came up with this design!

    anyway thanks for sharing!

  6. Love the tutorial…
    It’s so cool…I really need to learn illustrator well…cuz this is just an awesome use of it for after effects…

  7. Viktor says:

    Thanks a lot wanted to know how this effect was done.

  8. Kevin says:

    Good stuff. Thanks.

    When you first are making the triangles in Ai, it looks like you’re using a Snap option to keep the sides of the triangles aligned… what’s that trick?

  9. wshwsh00 says:

    look good ~~

  10. Satya Meka says:

    Nice design. But, to make this effect quicker and easy I would suggest using shape layers to have more control on animations.Also, with proper expressions you can skip parenting all the layers imported which saves time and easy to modify something later on ( which I say as alternative). Regardless, wonderful execution.

  11. Carlos says:

    Awesome tutorial man, love it! Thanks!

  12. chrisberthe says:

    This is sick :) Thank you.

  13. Jorge says:

    We need more tuts like this! Great one! Probably the best so far.

  14. ThatGuySy says:

    Can someone help me with the stage involving Illustrator. I don’t really understand, is there a very tiny gap between the triangles, (eg a few pixles) or are they actually touching eachother. If it is the lattar can someone explain how to do it. Thanks!

    PS amazing tutorial. keep’em coming!

    • Wes Kandel says:

      It doesn’t really matter. But if you’re trying to reproduce the exact effect, then the triangles are touching each other. This can be achieved easily in Illustrator CS4 using the “snap to point” option under the view menu. However, I honestly can’t remember if that snapping option was available before CS4.

  15. Oscar Dante says:

    We need more like this. Love it, need to try it out

  16. SAJAY says:

    sIMPLY gREAT..!

  17. Niko says:

    This tut looks awesome, especially love tuts that combine illustrator and after effects.

    Alas downloaded the tut in mp4 quicktime. screen goes blank (green) at 1 min 30 seconds.

  18. Tom says:

    nice origami konotation

  19. John says:

    I really liked the final product, absolutely spectacular. But the tutorial was disappointing; finding out you did most of it all manually especially, very inefficient. Also, seemed like you didn’t know what you were doing often throughout the tutorial on the basics. Work on your general presenting skills as well.

  20. MEGAFATBOY says:

    In the tut you said you applied the wiggle expression to make the camera shake, how did you do that to the beat? I have been looking for a solution for a week, how did ya do it?

  21. REHMAT HADI.PAKISTAN ...PESHAWAR says:

    It is the first time i am joining this site and in a very short time i understood it as very creative and more informative site leading the whole community towords a possitive and fruitful direction.The site is very beautful and needs beautifull works as it has to improve and servive its hold on sites..

  22. Petter says:

    Great tut!
    -Another swed

  23. melleMel says:

    how do you get the look for the triangles? the flashy transparent look? please and thank you~

  24. Magua says:

    Sorry, question here. For some reason, after I’ve made my work in AI and I go to import it into AE as “Cropped Layers”, it’s not actually cropping to the objects in the AI file, but seems to be always bringing it in at whatever the document size is (in this case 1280×720). Is there a setting with the artboards/document size that I should be looking out for? Transparency settings? Thanks!

  25. Tiffany says:

    top notch! Thank you for showing us this!

  26. Alex says:

    Show !!

  27. Krimzon says:

    GREAT!

    who plays the song?

    From Sudamerica!

  28. Julian says:

    Wow, this tutorial is incredible. It really shows how simple animations can make an incredible overall effect.

    You’re a really good “teacher” too, you should consider making more tutorials. You sound professional, and you have just the right amount of comedy in the video. Not too much that you sound retarded, and not too little that one would fall asleep while watching.

    Incredible work, I love the whole thing. Thank you for coming up with such a great idea. I learned a lot about organization, and how to turn simple animations into something incredible. Again, thank you.

  29. hacrystal says:

    hi. Thank you for good tutorial.^^*
    I studed this tutorial
    I have question~!! Please answer me

    You made Scale Control and Rotation Control in”chaos control” Layer

    I can’n serch Scale Control and Rotation Control
    Where is the control tool?

    I’am a beginner.ㅠㅠ

    I waitting for your answer.

    좋은하루 보내세요^^*

  30. Paul says:

    Hi Wes,

    I’m trying to tackle this as my first AE tutorial as I have a future project in mind where I can utilize the possesses you’ve shown here. It’s been going ok so far but I’ve hit a wall when trying to parent a layer master position to a position controller (null object).

    I get the following After Effects warning: Object of type layer found where a Number, Array, or Property is needed…

    I’m wondering, did you just rename the base triangle layer to master? Are my ai layers saved correctly? Like I said a wall…

    Any help, would be very much appreciated. Regards, Paul.

  31. Tyrone says:

    Hi, I seem to have a problem, when I place the individual letter comps inside a main “text” comp, each comp appears as a single layer, unlike yours which appears to show each individual vector layer? I’m also a bit confused with the step where you parent the individual triangle layers of each letter to its master, after they’ve all ready been parented in the previous step..

  32. stlay says:

    Tell me what kind of music? title track pls)

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